NBA.com writer Steve Aschburner took to the pages of the Federalist today to give the Baseball Hall of Fame 1,600 pieces of his mind about changes made to the voting procedures for selecting players to be enshrined in Cooperstown.

The only reasonable thing to do was to go full FJM:

It sounds like something Yogi Berra would have said—“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”—and, with the former Yankee great’s passing two months ago, it’s something he probably should have said to the folks who run the baseball Hall of Fame where the legendary catcher and master of the malapropism is enshrined.

It is broken. Rule of 10. Luddite voters. Grudge holders. The whole process is a mess. Sometimes you get ballots that look like this.

By fixing what ain’t broke—by tinkering with a voting procedure time-tested across most of its 79 years—the Hall soon might wind up dishonoring Berra and his contemporaries from baseball’s pre-steroids era. 

Not to mention the era before they let the brown people in.

Fiddling with the selection process could open its doors to known or suspected cheaters, including two of the most polarizing figures in the game’s history: Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens.

All players in the Hall of Fame were choir boys on off days, yes?

But then, altering the outcome of elections by changing the electorate is one of this nation’s other national pastimes.

Like doing away that 3/5 of a human thing. And letting women vote, not to mention non-property owners. Or the poll tax.

Over the summer, well before ballots for the Class of 2016 were mailed out last week, the Hall’s board of directors decided to revoke the “lifetime” voting privileges of many who had participated for decades. Balloting is handled by the Baseball Writers Association of America, with ten years of consecutive membership required to earn a Hall vote. Until this year, active and former BBWAA members voted in perpetuity. With the rule change, the Hall told the BBWAA that voters need to have been active members within the past ten years.

In other words, if you haven’t covered baseball since before Facebook and Twitter were invented, you are going to have to sit it out. Seems scandalous.

That means approximately 100 to 125 longtime voters—about 20 percent of the total group (549 ballots were cast in 2014)—no longer will be involved. Those who have been dropped are, necessarily, more senior members; “honorary” is the word on their lifetime BBWAA cards, reflecting that they either are actually retired from baseball-writing careers or have moved on to other work inside or outside media outlets.

Good.

One reason for the change, insiders report, is optics. The Hall’s board grew tired of criticism—most stridently coming from non-voters working for alternative Web sites—that too many former writers who no longer have ties to the game were voting.

Those working at alternative websites are right. And what is an alternative website? By the way, Aschburner wrote this at the Federalist, which I believe has been publishing continuously since 1763.

But had the results suffered? If the process were flawed, you would expect to see one or both of the following: Undeserving candidates being enshrined or deserving candidates getting snubbed often enough to fall off the ballot after their ten-year eligibility periods. Neither was happening, and no one from the board, from Chairman Jane Forbes Clark on down, has made that claim.

Tim Raines would like a word.

So where’s the harm in spiffing up the voting rolls, striving to appear more “relevant” and pruning some senior members who are presumed to not be as plugged in to the game or to take their duty as seriously as in the past? History. Context. Tradition. That is to say, core values without which no Hall of Fame or museum has reason to exist.

So, with the removal of 100 to 125 voters who haven’t covered baseball at least since Bryce Harper was 12, the Hall of Fame has no reason to exist. That logic is fool proof.

It ought to be seen as a good thing to have voters who actually saw and in many cases covered legends such as Willie Mays, Tom Seaver, Johnny Bench, and Mike Schmidt. Who better to compare today’s and tomorrow’s stars against those already enshrined, not just according to statistics but through eyewitness testimony, than veteran voters?

Ah, the eye test.

Consider this: An active BBWAA member who is 35 years old would have trouble remembering Willie Stargell or Joe Morgan as players beyond video clips. He or she wouldn’t have been born when Frank Robinson or Luis Aparicio was playing. Those voters likely wouldn’t have begun their media careers when more recent inductees such as Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn were dominant performers.

Morgan and Stargell aren’t on the ballot. Nor are Robinson and Aparicio.

Heck, with this overzealous rule change, candidates still on the Hall ballot—Jeff Bagwell, Alan Trammell, Tim Raines, Edgar Martinez—could lose support because voters who had actually watched and covered them have been dumped. We’ll find out when this year’s results are announced on Jan. 6.

So it’s the older voters only who are voting for Bagwell, Trammell, Raines and Martinez? Please show your work. (By the way, Aschburner did not vote for Bagwell last year.)

All of this is sideways enough for an institution that’s meant to embrace excellence across generations. Where the change may have a greater, more insidious effect—unintended or not—is ushering into the Hall some known or suspected users of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), in part by overemphasizing analytics without regard for some of the fundamental requirements for election. Right there in the Hall’s bylaws, it instructs voters to consider each candidate’s “record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.” That is the cornerstone that, so far, has tripped up the steroids bunch and those who support them.

All players in the Hall of Fame were choir boys on off days, yes?

Arguments to look the other way on actual or alleged PED use, to rationalize away the character imperative when assessing the likes of Bonds, Clemens, Bagwell, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, or Mike Piazza, have grabbed at everything from Gaylord Perry’s nefarious use of Vaseline for spitballs to Ty Cobb’s purported racism. Yet during baseball’s steroids era, roughly from 1991 to 2003, game results were tilted, records got tarnished, and rival players’ health or livelihoods were put at risk, based on their choice to either join or resist the doping practices of the game’s (literally) biggest stars.

Wait, Bagwell? Didn’t you just say two paragraphs ago that Bagwell could lose support “because voters who had actually watched and covered (him) had been dumped”? Wouldn’t you think that is a good thing?

Either way, we are throwing names out there willy nilly, aren’t we? And how does he know that the players he has voted for didn’t use? Here is his Hall of Fame ballot from last year:

Biggio, Johnson, E.Martinez, P.Martinez, Mattingly, Mussina, Raines, Smith, Smoltz, and Trammell

Not one of them ever used? Are you sure? None popped a greenie? None? Are you sure? (To be clear, we are not saying they did; we are saying the moral preening by those who attack Bonds, Clemens, Sosa & Co. is just that – moral preening.)

Shedding older, typically more traditional Hall voters likely will carry over the trend in modern culture in which “judging”—making moral assessments about things like integrity and sportsmanship—often is considered worse than whatever dubious acts cause one to be judged. 

Sigh.